


Recondite harmonies

by Aeshna etonensis (GMWWemyss)



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, English National Opera, Gen, M/M, Operas, Royal Opera
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-31
Updated: 2016-03-31
Packaged: 2018-05-30 09:07:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6417484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GMWWemyss/pseuds/Aeshna%20etonensis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We’ve all seen the ‘my flat is next yours and we duet as strangers in adjoining showers through thin walls’ bit. And then I remembered a classic WILTY episode involving Gareth Malone....</p>
<p>The title of course is from <i>Tosca.</i> Which – fair warning – tells you: you want to brush up your operatic knowledge for this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Recondite harmonies

* * *

Liam did most of his best thinking in the bath; and much of his best work in the shower. (He’d made the mistake of saying as much, once, to Louis: which had of course started Tommo off on the most outrageous riff of innuendo. Tommo only _looked_ like a choirboy. Well: and sounded like a cathedral school treble, too, sometimes. Liam hadn’t, really, minded too terribly: Tommo had wanted cheering, with all the utter shit which he endured....)

Haz, of course, had done the most to cheer Tommo, and always had done and always should: which is what one expected, after all, of a partner. (Liam firmly dismissed any vagrant thought of how lovely it should be if _he_ had a partner.) And Haz was the sort, anyroadup, who’d _be_ cheering and comforting, to perfect strangers down the local quite as much as to a partner.

He’d been through the fire himself. He’d done his Sixth Form at Chet’s – and it dogged him yet, Chet’s not having shaken off old scandals and its old boys and old girls always subject to rumour and cruel suggestion. It had been at the Royal Northern that he’d met Tommo; and by all accounts, it had been mad devoted love at first sight.

Just as well, thought Liam, soaking away the soreness of his rigorous training session. They’d had a hardish sort of row to hoe in damned stony ground, had Haz and Tommo. Honest critics doing their sometimes distasteful jobs were one thing; but the snobs and the knobs.... It was unfathomable, honestly, that, of all people, classical musicians and opera singers should be expected and encouraged to be rampantly straight, but they were. Everyone expected tenors, for example, to be interested only in bedding hundreds of women in the intervals of heroic gluttony at meals: which worked well enough for Nialler, thought Liam with a fond smile, although the Almighty had missed a trick by neither making Niall Horan a basso nor nudging Strauss into making Baron Ochs a lyric tenor, because Niall was in all aspects save his _Fach_ simply _born_ to sing Ochs in _Rosenkavalier._ And baritones, as Liam knew all too well, were stereotyped as sporty, manly sorts … he realised, with a start, he was humming the Toreador Song to himself. Which was a bit too apt.

The thing was.... Haz’ voice. Well. It had never matched his look: or his habit and his personality, which was not precisely sporty, was it, and as for testosterone, Haz might, er, top (the walls were, thought Liam, really far too thin), but he was not only pan, not to say, omnisexual, but the Sensitive Sort. And that puckish pixie of a Tommo, the next thing to a countertenor, exuded camp.

And it was absurd that that had been a problem. Yet it had been. Leaving aside all the clots who thought, or pretended they thought, that Haz had been interfered with at Chet’s, there remained the stupid prejudice and the stereotype. He’d met the two, along with Nialler and (all too briefly) that absurdly gorgeous, forbiddingly shy Malik lad, only in London, after Haz and Tommo had been HazAndTommo for several years; and had loved them immediately. It had cut him deeply to have seen, impotent upon the touchline, what they’d suffered. They were all five of them doing postgraduate courses: he and Nialler at RAM, the other three at RCM; and breaking themselves to get on wherever they might, in choruses, at Glyndebourne or ENO. And they did begin to get notices, and get noticed.

Liam had been a pure lyric baritone, then, not yet a dramatic one, not having the years and the weight and the timbre; Haz, though, had apparently been Scarpia since his balls had dropped. Liam was nowadays capable of _Kavalierbariton_ and Verdi baritone roles, and was working diligently to develop his lower-register tessitura for dramatic baritone parts. Haz, meanwhile....

No one minded that Niall somehow managed to be unscathed whatever befell. That happy little ball of Irish sunshine had by all accounts gone through the Royal Irish without breaking stride or a sweat (or, much more miraculously, gaining an ounce or finding himself with a paternity order and paying maintenance), and was even now a general pet (although, as Sir Martin said, with all the world-weary cynicism of a veteran basso, you’d be a fool to trust him with malt, maid, or money; it hadn’t stopped Sir Martin being indulgently avuncular to Niall as much as or more than to the other three, and collaring them nowadays to insist they not rot their guts at the Thai place or Nando’s or GBK, when they could, on the selfsame street, be his guests at Rules).

Liam sighed, and flicked his rubber duck over in the bathwater.

Liam did feel a certain lasting guilt that _he’d_ got off so lightly. Oh, there were those who even now regarded it as somehow improper that a working class lad from Wolvo should sing, should be _allowed_ to sing, opera, and who complained that he sung Italian or German or French with a Black Country accent, and, _Are_ there any operas in Yam-Yam? But he’d got off very lightly all the same, having disarming charm and the sort of looks which had, perhaps more even than his timbre, made him a _Kavalierbariton._ People simply _bought_ him as Don Giovanni, or the Conte di Luna, or Simon Boccanegra, quite as much as they’d accepted him as Figaro or Papageno.

The other three, however....

Tommo had endured, with the bloody-minded endurance of a Professional Yorkshireman, as long as he might and longer than anyone ought ever to want to endure. Jibes at his height. Blatant comments, couched as legitimate criticism, about his sexuality (Rossini’s ‘... Almaviva is a desperate lover of women, and camp does not become him’; ‘Gounod intended Roméo to be mad for Juliette, not Mercutio. We expect singers to be able to _act_ at least to that extent’). And the incessant hammering away at his voice: ‘Mr Tomlinson has a voice very well suited to many uses: in the West End, perhaps, or provincial Gilbert & Sullivan rep companies, or boyband popera of the G4 sort...’. The Peter Pears references had been unceasing.

It had finally broken him, and he’d given up for a time. (Liam had been supportive, but bracing, even at the risk of being waspishly called as, ‘Daddy’ – which had caused Haz’ brow to furrow, for reasons Liam preferred not to reflect upon; Liam had sent Tommo off to some coaches he knew, with admirable results.)

Sadly, whilst Tommo had been pulling himself together, Haz had felt it incumbent upon him to keep them afloat – and wouldn’t take help from Liam. Instead, he’d almost wrecked his voice through overwork and overuse and the wrong sort of singing: he’d bloody played bloody _Blackpool,_ and done any gig on offer, and all but become a Butlins Redcoat, and let himself be paraded at parvenu birthdays and weddings, and all of it far too often. He’d … Liam squirmed to think of it … done the most Grobanish, Boccellian things, had poor Hazza....

And it had been so _unnecessary_. Liam was very well aware, ta ever sodding so, of what it cost them between them to keep their absurdly overpriced shoebox of a flat in Covent Garden, where rents were higher for an offie or a newsagent’s than for an entire office block in, say, Brent. But he’d _offered_ to help; and he could _afford_ to help.

He hadn’t traded on his looks: well, no more than he could help.... (He was increasingly referred to by fans and Fleet Street as ‘the coming British Hvorostovsky’, which he found absurd, if flattering; though when he caught, nowadays, a mirrored glimpse of the height of his forehead, he _did_ rather wish he were going prematurely grey with a Siberian mane after the manner of Dmitri Aleksandrovich, rather than a bit, well, House of Windsor bald.) And, despite the sarky and not really friendly rumours, he hadn’t prostituted himself – or, although he felt guilty for thinking in these terms, his art. (Not that he’d accuse Haz of having done, not for worlds....)

Liam sometime wondered how on earth _American_ singers managed. By all accounts, _their_ pay packets were so low they might as well be on – and they qualified for – the bloody dole. But opera, at anything less than the very highest level, wasn’t precisely a royal road to riches in the UK, either. Haz and Tommo tended to blame HM Government (and, frankly, Liam was a bit tired of his friends condemning him as a Tory and a Thatcherite if he demurred, although Niall always simply said it was no using trying to draw _him_ in, he was Fine Gael, sure and he was, but); Liam, who _knew,_ attributed the absurd way in which artists were done down, to the obscene amounts arts administrators paid themselves (and, on peril of strikes, the technical trades) rather than their artists.

Liam knew this because that was how he’d not only survived, but had flourished, comparatively. And so, if he recalled, had Malik done....

Christ, but they’d been a lot of dewy-eyed twinks in those days: Haz all curls and dimples, Niall absurdly blond, Tommo dressing like a matelot – in a Genet-inspired porno.... And he himself: well. Old snaps made him wince even now: he’d looked like the model on the splash page for a pay Emo Twinks site. Malik, though, innocent as he’d been, had had a spark which had been as a flame to a moth for Liam.

There simply hadn’t been _time._

Zain Malik – Liam understood that he styled it nowadays as ‘Zayn’ – had had it if anything worse than had Tommo. From an early age, he’d been news for all the wrong reasons: ‘Operatic “Billy Elliot”: Bradford Lad Wants To Be Next Pavarotti’; ‘British Pakistani Teen Goes For Mozart Over Muezzin’.... He’d been one of the three most talked-about British Pakistanis, poor lad, at an appallingly young age, joint first alongside a boxer … and the C of E Bishop of Rochester. He’d felt – whether he’d wanted to or not – burdened to represent a community which was of two minds about his operatic ambitions, in an arts community which marched against Islamophobia and turned into Kipper oiks at the thought of a Muslim of part-Pakistani descent singing Nadir, or Erik, or Cavaradossi. A world in which people sneered at his class and his consonants; and one in which self-appointed ‘social justice warriors’ pre-emptively condemned him for ‘taking part in his own oppression and validating the appropriation of his own culture’ if he sang any of the ‘white’, tenor roles – Belmonte or Pedrillo – in _Die Entführung aus dem Serail:_ as if it were _his_ fault Mozart had jokingly made Osmin the Turkish eunuch a basso, and the only available tenor parts, Europeans – and don’t dare even _think_ of putting on _Der Barbier von Bagdad_ unless you’d like to be demoed....

An ugly world.

And he’d turned his back on it.

And had done before Liam could really get to know him, or make certain that Zain was, as Liam was, discreetly but not secretly or shamefacedly bi. Because Liam had very much hoped he _was,_ and might be interested....

But Zain Malik had left. He was Zayn now, and, more to the point, DJ Malik. And Liam understood that very well.

Zayn had done a combined BMus degree at Leeds College of Music: performance _and_ production. Liam was a product of the Birmingham Conservatoire; his BMus was a BMus, nothing more, no combined degree or joint schools having been on offer. But he’d been accepted, by dint of an insane work ethic, to the accelerated Birmingham MMus, wherein he could qualify in production and engineering, and had done; and, like Zayn, was now a qualified, and increasingly sought-after, producer.

Which is why Liam could easily afford this flat and its absurd cost (never mind that it consisted of walls thinner than tea sandwiches, and occupied the first and second storeys over a shop), and could easily have aided Haz and Tommo rather than see them backsquadded to ENO or taking gap years; and why he _knew_ that the reason performers were being buggered over, wasn’t governmental miserliness, but the way the dosh went to administrators and, yes, engineers. Yes, he’d done a bit of modelling – all above-board, fashion-based, and no faces, ta, and why not, he’d worked damned hard for this body now soaking sybaritically in the bath, a rebuke to jeering bullies of long ago, and had nothing to be modest about –; but it was as Big Payno, producer and DJ and sound engineer, that he made the dosh which allowed him to fund his dreams.

By all accounts, Zayn had given up those dreams, so far as Liam had heard; but, as Liam knew from rumour on the circuit, Zayn, Oop North, was pulling it down quite as well as was Liam, in the same fashion. He hoped Zayn hadn’t quit singing entirely, or given up wholly on his miraculous gifts and attainable ambitions....

Liam sighed, and rose dripping from the bath.

* * *

Haz and Tommo were back at last. (There’d been hugs – after the fight between them and Liam when they’d found that Big Payno Productions had put all the money they’d sent to keep their share of the flat, back into their accounts. Nialler had finally intervened, and dragged them all to the Harp to sink their quarrels in several pints. Niall could always be relied on to pick a CAMRA pub, even if Haz wished to go down the Lamb and Flag for the history and Tommo insisted on the Salisbury because of its long association with gay rights and gay-friendliness.) They were back in good voice, too, thanks to rest and coaching – indeed, in better voice than for years. And they were very busy just now, with a new chance – which they were determined not to muck up – at ENO (a limited chamber run of _Albert Herring,_ with Louis in the title role and Harry as a visually unlikely vicar).

Liam himself, and Niall, were now regulars at the Royal. They currently had _Gianni Schicchi_ on, Niall as Rinuccio and Liam as Marco – but understudying the title role. They were Going Places.

Speaking of going places.... Haz and Tommo were gone, to rehearsal. They’d mentioned they were putting up an old friend (Tommo had smirked, but Liam had ceased to register Tommo’s incessant smirking: he was simply glad to see Tommo happy once more); Liam hoped their guest was out as well, because the Place he was Going, by God, was a nice, hot shower.

And no power on earth could stop him singing in the shower.

* * *

Liam stopped singing in the shower, with a sudden start so great he as near as damn it slipped and fell.

Haz and Tommo’s guest was apparently of the same mind as to showers and singing.

Liam had been belting out, happily, that old comfortable chestnut, the _[Largo al factotum della città](https://youtu.be/TKDXr_fimQ8). _ And the moment he’d finished, his unexpected neighbour, with a quick, laughing, ‘Hey! Figaro!’, had launched them into the duet between Figaro and Count Almaviva, _[All’idea di quel metallo](https://youtu.be/rkn5Nz5jUAg). _ The neighbour, cheekily, had sung Almaviva in English: _An ENO mate, then,_ thought Liam, _as one’d expect of Haz and Tommo._

That, thought Liam, explained the faint, vague familiarity of the voice – and the cheeky familiarity of the mural duet. No doubt he’d met the bloke somewhere at an ENO crush, or through H&T. Though he couldn’t, offhand, recall any spinto tenors very well. (The accent was faintly Northern, though chastened and trained largely away. Possibly one of Tommo’s mates from God’s Own County, then....)

It reminded him, the voice – although remotely –, just a little of Zain’s, though _he’d_ been a lyric tenor just a trifle darker than was Tommo, and pegging level with Sunny Niall. Liam smiled, reminiscently, with an old fondness he wished had come to fruition before it had all gone pear-shaped.

The next day, after his training and before rehearsal, Liam wondered if his neighbouring guest might indulge another duet.

He was not disappointed. And was confirmed in his estimation that the lad was cheeky, whatever else he was; and insanely talented. It wanted both talent and cheek to break in to [_Fin ch’han dal vino calda la testa_](https://youtu.be/X97WnX0wB90) with Don Basilio’s _[In quegl’anni](https://youtu.be/rsXInnGmbbg),_ after all. And more to follow up with trading about [_Je suis Escamillo, torero de Grenade!_](https://youtu.be/Ymk-Ji8SPp8) with funny voices, accents, and parodies … and deliberately singing a semitone off, and in English, to throw one’s partner off.

Liam was still giggling to himself when he arrived at rehearsal, to Niall’s bewilderment.

* * *

Liam had knocked, several times, on the door of H&T’s rooms in the flat. To no avail. Evidently, their guest was determined to remain an operatic phantom.

* * *

After a fortnight of this, Liam was increasingly frustrated – in every sense: it _is_ possible to fall in love with a voice and a personality –; Niall was laughing like a hyaena, having caught on to the predicament, which was, admittedly, like a cross between an opera bouffe and a French farce; and Haz as well as Tommo had begun smirking ’round the clock.

‘Does he ever _leave_ the bloody flat?’

Haz had laughed in Liam’s frustrated face. ‘Yah.... When _you_ do.’

Liam had set his jaw and his teeth. ‘This. This is … you two puerile twats are taking it out of me because you’re browned off over the money situation. Aren’t you?’

Tommo had sniggered. ‘Now, really, Liam, would we do summat like that? You do talk a lot of shit, Leemo; honestly!’

* * *

Liam had lost patience with the whole damned thing.

And then, at rehearsals, they’d got the news that next season was to include _Les pêcheurs de perles._ There was no chance Liam was not going to go for _that,_ for Zurga.

And there was no chance he wasn’t going to break down H&T’s door and drag their guest into the light and force him to try for Nadir.

The next day, an off day, Liam stepped into the shower and turned on the tap, and waited until he heard the adjacent shower turn on.

‘Mate,’ said Liam. ‘Enough faffing about. You know it, I know. There’s a reason, all right, why I _need_ you to do this. Straight, all right?’

And he began. ‘ _C’était le soir...._ ’

He finished the verse with his heart hammering, ‘ _Appelaient lentement la foule à la prière!_ ’

And the response came, pure and sweet, silvery spinto: ‘ _[Au fond du temple saint](https://youtu.be/p2MwnHpLV48)...._ ’

They finished the aria: Liam at least knowing he’d never sounded better. Or meant words more sincerely: _Oui, partageons le même sort, / Soyons unis jusqu’à la mort!_ ‘Yes, let us share the same fate, let us be united unto death!’

‘Right,’ said Liam, catching his breath with an effort. ‘ _You_ are going out for this next season. _We_ are going to sing this. And _I_ am coming over right bloody now, and _you_ are damned well going to answer the bleeding door.’

He could just hear a choked, ‘Yes’; and he did not bother with more than a towel as he scrambled perilously out of the shower.

He hammered at the door; and let his hand – and jaw – fall as it opened.

This was not sweet, lyric tenor, cusp-of-manhood Zain, thought Liam, even as he stood astounded by his own stupidity: Had not _he_ grown and matured in voice and body, and, Why, then, ought he to have thought Zain had not?

This was Zayn, _now,_ shoulders and cheekbones and spinto tenor voice and acres of beautiful skin and –

They crashed into one another, arms and lips and tongues – and more, as their towels fell disregarded away.

* * *

Zayn no longer stopped with Haz and Tommo, who were now being borrowed from time to time from ENO by the Royal. Nor did he occupy Niall’s couch, for that matter. He’d not left the flat; but he shared – everything; bed included – with Liam, now.

Everything: including duties at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and the company of the Royal Opera.

They had just performed, as audition for the roles, _Au fond du temple saint._

The Chief Executive and the Director of Opera looked over to the Music Director.

‘I have heard Björling and Merrill. I have heard JK and Dmitri. Gentlemen.... I have _never_ heard better.

‘Congratulations. You have the roles.’

_Oui, partageons le même sort,  
_ _Soyons unis jusqu’à la mort._

* * *

 

**FINIS**

 


End file.
